Barbara Hambly - Dead water

After their departure, the men settled down to cards again. Davis, Molloy, Gleet, and a bachelor planter named Lockhart made up one table of whist and—January never quite saw how this was maneuvered—Hannibal and Byrne formed up a set against the Massachusetts mill-owner Dodd and Weems.

They were still at it two hours later when January put up his borrowed guitar, finished the coffee Thu had quietly brought him, and nodded good-night to the impassive steward. Weems was winning, and played his cards with an air of cocky excitement and new-found delight. January saw the glance of almost sleepy amusement that passed between Hannibal and the gambler Byrne, and could have pitied Weems if the man hadn't effectively ruined him and Rose. It was fascinating to see them set him up, playing as much on his greed and vanity as on his inexperience: “Lord, you're hot tonight,” murmured Hannibal approvingly, and Byrne shook his head, adding, “Look like it's not going to be my evening.”

January was reminded of those farm-wives who made pets of their rabbits so the little creatures wouldn't run away when it came time to knock their heads off for the pot.

Dodd, of course, simply chomped and slurped his way through the “little after-dinner snack” he'd ordered of pickled eggs and crullers, seeming barely to notice how much he lost.

The night was close and hot when January emerged onto the upper deck promenade. The hard silvery light of the quarter-moon sparked on the paddle where it threshed at the water, and from above him he heard Molloy's voice calling jovial insults at his assistant pilot, a gangling and talkative young man named Souter. From the other side of the boat as he descended the steps to the lower promenade, he heard the slave men singing: “I'm goin' away to New Orleans. . . .”

And like the sweet breath of evening wind, the voices of the chained women rose in the response, “Good-by, my love, good-by. . . .”

Closer, below him in the well of darkness, a woman's voice gasped, “Let go!”

“S'matter, honey, you too fond of them Frenchies to want a real man?” The voice was drunken, the accent from up-river somewhere, Kentucky or Tennessee.

Another voice giggled, “Can't tell us a pretty yeller gal like you, you ruther have one a' them black bucks over there, 'stead of Kyle an' me.”

“No—”

“You hear somethin', Kyle?”

“Not me. 'Fraid she must be speakin' Frenchy. . . .”

January had already started down the stair—wondering what the hell he could say to an unknown number of intoxicated white boatmen that wouldn't get him beaten up—when he heard Rose's voice: “Allow me to translate for you gentlemen.”

She spoke in the carrying steely tone of a schoolmistress, and as he sprang down from the stairs he saw the little group by the thin reflected glow of the engine-room door. There were three of them, shaggy-haired, dirty, and bearded, in faded shirts and Conestoga boots, hemming in the fairy-like little maidservant he'd seen following Mrs. Fischer on board. One of the boatmen had pulled off her headscarf, her thick hair hanging in a dark coil to her waist. She was pressed against the piled wood, arms folded tight over her breasts while the men tried to pull her hands away.

Rose stood in front of them, spectacles flashing.

“Git on outa here, bitch.”

Rose didn't move. Only looked at the men with calm disdain.

“Git on outa here,” said another. “'Fore we take a switch to you, too—or some other rod you won't like so well.”

Rose stood her ground. From the darkness behind her emerged Miss Skippen's tall, lush-breasted young maid, and the stout nursemaid who'd chased the Tredgold children around the deck, and a little white-haired woman whom January recognized as the mother of Eli the cook . . . all standing with their arms folded, simply watching the men with jeering eyes. Behind them in the dark the deck-hands began to emerge from the engine-room door, not offering any word or deed that could be termed as insolence, or punished as rebellion. Just simply staring.

That ring of watching eyes, January reflected, would be enough to make any man's drink-induced interest in rape stand down.

Mrs. Fischer's maid twisted free of the men's grips and ran to join the little group of women.

“Goddam bitches!” yelled the taller of the boatmen. “I got me a mind to buy the goddam lot of you, fuck the lot of you till you begs me for mercy!”

But the women merely turned away from them and faded into the darkness.

“Bitches!” yelled the tall man. “Hoors!” And his shorter companion, who had a yellow beard like a louse-ranch, took his arm and tugged him toward the piled wood that separated them from the chained slave women. “C'mon, Sam, somebody gonna be down here in a minute. . . .”

As the three men vanished through the gap between wood and rails, January heard one of them snarl, “What you lookin' at, bitch?” The words were followed by the meaty thud of a kick, a woman's stifled gasp, and the jingle of chains.

“Are you all right, honey?” Rose asked the maid in French as January came to join the women near the stern rail. They were little more than shapes in the dense shadows of the 'tween-decks, save for the flash of Rose's spectacles. Beyond them, moonlight flickered terrifyingly on the shapes of snags and towheads, bobbing in the water nearer shore.

“Thank you, yes, I'm fine. Thank you so much, Madame. . . .”

“Vitrac.” Rose used the name under which she'd bought her ticket. “Rose Vitrac.”

“I am Sophie Vannure.” The girl's voice shook with sobs she couldn't control. January wondered whether the little maid had been so well-treated all her life that this was her first experience with molestation, or whether some earlier wound had been opened. In either case, he saw Rose put her arm around the girl, supporting her lest she fall.

“These yours, honey?” The stout Tredgold nursemaid Cissy came over from the wood-piles, carrying a couple of big shawls that had been dropped there. Sophie held out her arms.

“Thank you, yes. My mistress . . .”

“She turn you out to sleep down here?”

“I know why my missus turn me out,” sniffed Miss Skippen's maid in the rough cane-patch French of one who'd probably cost a good deal less than the refined little Sophie. “With no more than ‘Julie, I'll want coffee in the morning.' Don't tell me m'am high-and-mighty Fischer got a gentleman friend comin' to visit her, like my Miss Theodora does?”

Sophie Vannure pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, still shaking with fear and humiliation. When she spoke, her voice dripped resentment and betrayal. “What other reason would Madame have, to tell me to go sleep outside on the deck like an animal?”

“Could be worse.” Julie's tone quirked with a bitter knowledge. “She could keep you in there to make up a three.”

Sophie's laugh was a spiteful sob. “Not with Mr. Weems,” she said. “Madame, she's not about to let anyone think she so much as knows what a man is, but she wouldn't share him—or anything else—with any other.”

“You mean Mr. Weems, the little man in the check trousers that looks like a weasel?” Julie hooted with laughter. “He don't look like he got the red blood in him to kiss the parlormaid!”

“He does not,” retorted Sophie, clearly steadied by the sympathy of new-found allies. “At the least he has never kissed me, though he looks, out of the corners of his eyes. He's too scared of Madame. He bought her house in New Orleans, and pays all her bills; yet it's she who says, ‘We will come here, we will go there.' Mr. Weems, he follows, like a little dog.”

“Well, think of that,” murmured Rose as she and January settled into the dark niche among the wood-piles, where they could watch the passway to the engine-room, and the purser's door. “A respectable lady like that, and a thief underneath.”

“What about a respectable schoolmistress like yourself,” replied January softly, his arm sliding around Rose's waist, “who is a wanton underneath?”

“I fear,” said Rose loftily, “that you have me mistaken for someone else—perhaps my wicked twin sister Elena.” And they laughed at the old joke—the twin sister was completely fictitious—and settled themselves to watch the comings and goings of the wood crew, for the chance to slip into either the office or the hold.

But Hannibal had been right in his observation that there was never a time when the passageway was completely empty. While the Silver Moon churned its heavy way upstream through the darkness, and Rose and January watched and slept in turns, they never saw either a sign of Queen Régine or of a moment when it would have been feasible to enter the office or the hold.

FIVE

In the pre-dawn dark of the following morning, talk around the water-barrel beside the galley door was all about how old Fussy-Pants Weems had had seven hundred and seventy-five dollars taken off him last night at whist, and serve him right. “Lord, I thought he's gonna shrivel up into a pile of dust when Byrne brought out that trump card, an' we'd have to sweep him off the floor in the mornin'!”

“They had three hundred dollars extra on the rubber—you think a man that won't tip the porter who brings up his luggage would know better than that!”

Fog lay on the river, but the sky overhead was hot and clear. A thousand birds cried their territories in the green wall of willows that grew along the batture, audible even over the splashing of the paddle. “How the devil can the pilot steer if he can't even see the surface of the water?” January asked Jim, who sat on a coil of rope at the far end of the starboard promenade, shaving by lantern-light and a hand-mirror he'd drawn from his pocket.

“By the shape of the banks,” replied the valet promptly. “Pilot sights on big trees, or houses on the banks, and knows the river—like knowin' there's a bar just above Houmas plantation, where the current sets around the point. Like walkin' around a chair in your massa's parlor in the dark. I been up and down this stretch of river, between Colonel Davis's place at Brierwood and New Orleans, a dozen times now with him, and even I'm startin' to recognize where there's a bar last time we passed.”

“I'll keep an eye on the passway here, between the galley and the engine-room,” said Rose when January returned to her, bringing wash-water and the gossip. “Thank goodness it's wide—I can see all the way through without being obvious about it.” She nibbled on a pear and some cheese, and a little of the bread she'd brought, and scanned the promenade as he spoke, as those deck-hands who'd worked through the night dossed among the wood and others rose and washed, and got their rations from Eli at the galley door.

“I'll come down and spell you when I can.” Though Rose had reported last night that she'd seen no sign of Queen Régine, whenever January had dropped off into sleep she was there, stealing up softly just behind the piles of wood that flanked them, or floating in the dark air just above the moonlit water, watching them with flaming eyes. In another dream he was haled before a drumhead court of planters, where Queen Régine accused him of being a free man: he was thrown into the river and had to swim to shore, with the dark snags underwater clawing at his legs, and Ned Gleet waiting on the bank with his chains.